When Dave met Bart

David Cameron, the British prime minister, ruffled a few francophone Belgian feathers last week by playing host in London to Bart De Wever, leader of the nationalist New Flemish Alliance (N-VA).

De Wever had a half-hour meeting at 10 Downing Street last Thursday and an N-VA delegation including Jan Jambon – who is something of a hate-figure to the Walloons – was then entertained at the national parliament in Westminster.

“De Wever is a significant player in Belgian politics. We don’t regard the N-VA as extremist. They are a centre-right party,” said David Lidington, the UK’s Europe minister.

But putting the Walloons’ noses out of joint might not have been Cameron’s main preoccupation. It seems that the meeting may have had more to do with the British Conservatives’ desire to strengthen their group in the European Parliament, the European Conservatives and Reformists.

Questions have resurfaced over the ECR’s stability after Michał Kaminski, a Polish MEP, quit as group leader in February. Kaminski and two other Polish members split from Poland’s Law and Justice party (PiS) to set up their own rival party within the ECR group.

Derk-Jan Eppink, a Belgian MEP who is already in the ECR, said that he helped broker Thursday’s meeting after Cameron and his staff expressed interest in meeting De Wever.

Eppink said that a “serious offer” was put in front of De Wever for his party to join up with the ECR group ahead of the next European elections. Although De Wever’s N-VA party has only one MEP at present, Frieda Brepoels, it now ranks as the most popular political party in Dutch-speaking Flanders, with opinion polls putting its support at about 30%. Brepoels sits in the Greens/European Free Alliance group, which gives rise to another question about the Cameron-De Wever love-in: is the N-VA sufficiently anti-federalist for the ECR? It took a very pro-EU stance during last year’s Belgian elections.